Better Choices
Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.
2 Peter 3:17-18 (NIV)
Thank God for our freedom to choose. It’s a gift given to us by God. But while we are grateful that God has given us the freedom of choice, we also can confess that we could be giving God a lot better choices.
We can walk a more powerful spiritual life. We can honor God in the multiplicities of our lives. We can resist the influential pull of the culture and not feel pressured by the intimidating volume and certainty with which false teachers promote their false ideas and beliefs, their desires and opinions. It requires the spiritual discipline to say: “I love God so much for giving me choices that I want to honor Him by giving Him better choices”.
You decide in your life that for you to honor God, you’re not going to chase easy choices. You can decide: “I don’t expect that with blessing comes ease of all decision making. I will not avoid hard choices, but not only will I not avoid hard choices, I will not be led by others’ choices. I’m going to steward the privilege God has given me to make a choice. And as I grow in faith, I’m going to offer Him better choices.”
While God has blessed you with the freedom of choice, can you acknowledge that you have not always been a good steward of that freedom? And if you are honest, you and I know we could offer God a lot better choices with regard to our lives—choices about what matters most.
What you and God have fought to do to get you where you are should not be so cheaply negotiated by the opinions of other people.
God has redeemed you and set you where He has positioned you. Only you know how much God has had to intervene in the cracks and crevices of your life’s progression to get you to a place of peace, to help you love yourself again, to make you not ashamed of who you have become. You don’t sell that cheaply. You protect that.
Fight to make better choices for God. Fight because the forward movement has been so transforming that you need to protect your progress. You are connected to God’s revealed mind, His express knowledge and thoughts, His eternal will.